Unpacking the hamper
THE surveys had it all wrong in the British general election. Far from Labour coming anywhere near forming a Faustian pact with the Scots nationalists to keep the Tories out, Lord Snooty is in, all clear, with a majority plus the support he will get from the dozen or so Unionists and Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland.
The pollsters are now going through the entrails of a goat to discover where they went wrong.
But, actually, the factor that turned the election was quite beyond their statistical capabilities. When millions of stomachs simultaneously churn in this digital age, there are immediate and unpredictable political spinoffs.
In the days running up to the election, a blogger named Guido Fawkes put up images of Labour leader Ed Miliband picking his nose on a train from Manchester to London. He was making a thorough job of it.
It’s not quite clear whether Ed consumed the harvest, so Guido Fawkes put it to the vote: “Did Ed eat his bogies?” (The feature was tagged with the World War II slogan: “Dig for Victory!”)
The result was emphatic. Altogether, 4 414 people responded. 89.28% said “Yes”. Only 10.74% said “No”. And, of course, the thing went viral. Millions of people round the world saw it, many of them in Britain.
Do you want a nosepicker as PM? No, the great British electorate decided.
With cameras everywhere, and the internet ever waiting, can politics ever be the same again?
Wimps
MEANWHILE, former pom Dave Gregory, of Ballito, says last week’s general election in Britain proves they are a bunch of wimps.
“They have just had an election in which 65 million people were involved, and there was not one riot and no one murdered. How wimpish is that?”
Maybe you’re being a bit unfair, Dave. Doon in Glasgow, where the Scots Nats are so powerful, the wee hard men was a-head-buttin’ at the polling station and givin’ the Glasgie Kiss – broken bottle in the face – juist tae encourage voters.
The polis didnae mak a fuss aboot it ’cos it was nothin’ oot o’ the ordinary, juist like a quietish Saturday nicht.
More cameras0
YES, the cameras are everywhere. The police in Greater Manchester, England, have got a fancy gismo with which they can record what’s going on inside the cab of a lorry or any other vehicle. Patrolling the M60 motorway, to their astonishment they found a lorry driver who was reading a book as he went along.
While it’s encouraging to know there are members of the trucking fraternity with a taste for literature, that surely can be pursued only in the transport caffs and at overnight stops.
What was he reading? Tolstoy? Shakespeare? Wordsworth? The cops don’t tell us. But they slapped him with a “graduated fixed penalty notice” – whatever that might mean.